Ok, here is my report on the D language for Go: The gdc (gnu D compiler) compiler for D is a bit better if you tune the options and there are a few more options to tinker with. It actually helped me find a bug (it is more anal) that probably made the other tests I reported invalid. The D program is now only 1.47 times slower than the equivalent C program, and even the digital mars compiler is ok but not quite as fast.
It's still too slow for my taste but I'm still trying to find out if I'm doing all I can do. It's possible there may be language idioms I should be using or better ways to do things in D that I don't know about. I do really like it - It's c++ without all the warts and lots of improvements. There are versions for windows, unix, Macs. I may start using it for other things - but probably not computer GO unless I can get it closer to C speed. Here are the numbers: The equivalent C version (after I took out some optimizations) is doing 13,745.70 games per second on an old pentium 4. My best D version is doing 9,327.49 games per second. The most optimized C version is doing 16,398.82 games per second. These same extra optimizations could be applied to the D version and I think it would help as much or even more - I manually unrolled some loops to save some branching and memory indirection. Dave Dyer think the extra 50% running time isn't that important but I know from my own scalability experiments that Lazarus running at this 1.47 handicap would be noticeably weaker on CGOS. I might accept the slowdown if it were more like 1.25, for the extra convenience. This language is very good at helping you with bugs - checking array bounds problems etc. - Don On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 22:11 -0500, Don Dailey wrote: > On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 17:54 -0800, steve uurtamo wrote: > > > I'll see if I can figure out what options turn on > > > all the speed now ... > > > > C > > > > :) > > > > s. > > You might be right. I finally found the useful switches which were "-O > -release -inline" > and it did speed things up, but I'm still almost 2.4 times slower than > the equivalent C version with the best optimizations. > > That's way too much for me - pity I would really enjoy working in this > language. > > One more thing to try - there is a gcc version I will try. > > I wonder if the object oriented stuff hurts it? Does anyone know if > that poses a lot of extra overhead in say c++? Almost the whole > program is contained and working from inside the class I defined to > encapsulate most of the functionality. > > > - Don > > > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
